He laughed at me. I turned red. Maybe I was the fool, telling an abbot about confidentiality. He just said, "There are places you would need to be more concerned about that aspect than here, Inspector." '1 suppose so," I mumbled. "Can your data retrieval system handle a five-mile radius?"

The caterpillars drooped; I'd offended him. "I thought you were going to ask for something difficult. Inspector." He got up. "If you'd be so kind as to follow me?"

I followed. We walked past a couple of rooms my eyes refused to see into. I wasn't offended; there are places in the Temple in Jerusalem and even in your ordinary synagogue where gentiles' perceptions are excluded the same way. All faiths have their mysteries. I was just thankful the Thomas Brothers didn't reckon their records too holy for outsiders to view.

The scriptorium was underground, a traditional construction left over from the days when anyone literate was assumed to be a black wizard and when books of any sort needed to be protected from the torches of the ignorant and the fearful. But for its placement, though, the room was thoroughly modem, with St. Elmo's fire glowing smoothly over every cubicle and each of those cubicles with its own ground-glass access screen.

As soon as Brother Vahan and I stepped into a cubicle, the spirit of the scriptorium appeared in the ground glass. The spirit wore spectacles. I had to work to keep my face straight.

I'd never imagined folk on the Other Side could look bookish.

I turned to the abbot. "Suppose I'd come in without you or someone else who's authorized to be here?"

"You wouldn't get any information out of our friend there," Brother Vahan said. "You would get caught" He sounded quietly confident I believed him. The Thomas Brothers probably knew about as much about keeping documents secure as anyone not in government and what they didn't know, Rome did.